NXPowerLite - work in the cloud with smaller office files!

12/09/2008 by Gavin.

Working with Office files, especially presentations can sometimes result in bloated file sizes.  I’ve seen it with co-workers when working on presentations, the file size increases until in one extreme case I was sent a 99Mb Powerpoint presentation.  One option is of course to use Zip or Rar compression.  however, both these approaches mean uncompressing the file before each use or edit.

NXPowerLite  http://www.nxpowerlite.com works on Microsoft Office files from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint by compressing their content without changing the file format.  This is a terrific thing to have for the reasons given above.

The program lists several different levels of compression -  Normal, Extra (greater compression, lower quality), High Quality (less compression, higher quality), Mobile Device, and Custom.  I must admit I didn’t notice much difference in end quality (which is a good thing!) but of course some images may well degrade with compression.

I tried it with that 99Mb powerpoint presentation and it got it down to 3Mb!  Another presentation with general text, embedded spreadsheet and photos went down from 5Mb to 768Kb at high quality.  Yes you could do all this manually but it takes literally seconds for the program to do it’s stuff!

Where this comes into its own of course is when having to work ‘in the cloud’ or via email where bandwidth might still be an issue, on a 3G or PRS connection.

There is a trial version available on the website and I can recommend it as a very useful utility if you work a lot with Office Documents.

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